Cloak-and-dagger chemist peddling fake Viagra is a flop

THE Guardia Civil’s latest inventively-titled operation, code-named ‘Bao’, has resulted in the closure of a clandestine medicine laboratory in Sevilla, which fabricated drugs to combat obesity and erectile dysfunction to sell in Spain and Portugal.

A 32-year-old man who had constructed the artesanal workshop in his home, where he stored large quantities of prohibited drugs and excipients without the requisite sanitary conditions, has been arrested.

Investigations were opened in April, when customs officers at Liege airport in Belgium intercepted 1,086 grams of a banned substance called Sibutramine, which was destined for Spain.

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When they delved deeper, police officers discovered that the recipient and sender of the package were the same person, and that he had performed the same trick over 800 times in the last three years, using different addresses in around the Iberian Peninsula.

They also found that the same individual had been purchasing other chemicals such as taurine, caffeine, lactose, phenylethylamine, benzocaine, boric acid, lidocaine, and acetone, all of which pointed to the fabrication of some type of medicine.

A subsequent internet search revealed that the suspicious street scientist was selling under-the-counter products related to weight loss and sexual performance on several websites and forums.

Police then proceeded to raid the chemist’s home, where they unearthed the covert laboratory, complete with apparatus for encapsulation, weighing and packaging the illicit medications, which was all done by hand, with one of the machines even having been built using internet tutorials.

Several kilograms of banned substances were seized, some of which remain to be identified.